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I have had various bits of robots floating around for a while now and never actually pulled them all together. I’ve made both a Scratch, and a PS3 controlled, Pibrella powered bot which I must blog about one of these days. I also built one from LEGO motors and a SN754410 H-bridge a year or two back, but the motors were old (20+ years) and it didn’t get far.
Hardware
4tronix MicRoCon – It’s an all in one platform that provides power conversion from 6-9v down to 5v to so it can power the Pi as well as an H-bridge to drive the motors. The other feature I will make use of is some 5v connectors for servos. Mine is the v1.1 from early 2014, v3 is the current version hence the change in looks.
AdaFruit Pan and Tilt – This I picked up from Pimoroni. It’s a 2 servo device that has a base plate to mount items on like a……
Raspberry Pi Camera – If you don’t know what this is; it’s a webcam that plugs directly into the Pi, not via USB. Loads of places stock these
Car/Bot Chassis – Mine is one of these from EBay.
WiFi – Yes, you could do this wired, but that would be very limiting!
Software
Flask- A Python based light weight web framework. It’s relatively straight forward to use and allows us to control the GPIO directly.
RPIO – For this project I have moved away from the commonly used RPi.GPIO library as the servo control is less “jittery”. The RPIO library uses C to better manage the precise timings needed. Ultimately driving the servos via an Arduino or similar would provide the best results, but that was more complicated than I wanted to go.
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